(For peace, freedom and democracy, never again Fascism, millions of dead admonish.)

– Written on a stone marker outside the house in Branau where Hitler lived as a boy.

No one saw the Jewish baker

snatch it from its bedside perch

and slip it into his overcoat –

Hitler’s childhood room preserved

down to a pair of gabardine

short trousers hanging over his chair.

My uncle carried that clock

the rest of the war, woke each morning

to its empty crowing, then took it

back to Brooklyn. Three years later

his toddler sons, twin prodigies,

stole it from his drawer,

dismantling the mechanism beyond repair –

every wheel and cog and spring

spread across the living room table

like airplane wreckage he’d seen –

a senseless array of parts,

forlorn as disassembled countries,

or memories whose narratives

lie lost and scattered like ash.

Archival Footage

Bodies piled like lumber, tottering bodies

withered to bone, lampshades fashioned

of human skin, some displaying tattoos;

shrunken-head paperweights, bisected heads

preserved and suspended in transparent resin

neatly labeled Two Halves of theJew Brain.

Local townspeople trucked in. Now you can’t

tell the world you didn’t know. One woman

presses a handkerchief to mouth and nose,

a man dizzily cradles his chin. Look closely.

You can see history rooting in their bodies,

the horror of it pulling out their tongues.

Dina

After seeing Auschwitz prisoner Dina Gottliebova’s mural of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, painted for the camp’s child-victims, Josef Mengele – the Angel of Death – agreed to spare her family’s lives if she would sketch portraits of the Romani prisoners who underwent horrific torture at his hands.

Because she was chosen by the Angel of Death,

she remembers postcards from the dead –

hastily scrawled deceptions at gunpoint: “Greetings

fromWaldsee.” “I am working. Follow us here!”

how the joyful replies brightened pyres, smoke letters

rumoring the fetid air, Arbeit macht frei –

and because she sketched dwarves, giants,

gypsies, twins killed simultaneously by formaldehyde

injection into the heart, prior to dissection –

a brown-haired girl whose eyes still

beg her silently, she remembers the Sonderkommando

carting away thousands of prisoners a day –

that inconceivable lattice of flesh – how even

in death bodies cling to one another.

In dreams, she watches endless ash

clot the Vistula, dyeing the water gray.

And when the war ends, she paints in thick,

heavy strokes – IG Farben, Zyklon B,

the seven dwarves of industry: Schmitz, Schnitzler,

Meer, Ambros, Bütefisch, Ilgner, and Oster –

she paints them convicted, paints them released,

profiles them, pen and ink: chairmen of Bayer

and Deutsche Bank, board members of

chemical companies, oil companies, smoke screen

of financial consortiums. For the rest of her life,

Dina paints self-portraits, tilts the mirror until she is

dark-haired, fair-skinned, untouched by age.

A kingdom of memory inside her.

Torture

(At the Ministry of Dreams)

Scientists are

experimenting

to determine

the effects

of sleep deprivation

upon the fly.

After dusk,

when all the flies

have eaten,

groomed, and

settled in

for the night,

the Sleep Nullifying

Apparatus shakes

the flies awake

ten times per minute.

The scientists

are also searching

for mutant flies

that require

no sleep. Down the hall,

vibrating in jars

are the dreams

they have collected

from humans,

legs wading

through molasses,

chickens devolving

into eggs,

eggs cracking open

to reveal a silk

slipper, a candlestick,

an ancient door.

In some dreams,

we open the door,

descend slowly

into cellars,

one below another –

or climb, instead

an infinite spiral.

At night, all the dreams

knock restless against

their prisons,

wanting, like children

to go home.

Hideyoshi Recalls for His Concubine the Origin of the Nose Tomb

“Mow down everyone universally, without discriminating between young

and old, men and women, clergy and the laity—high ranking soldiers on

the battlefield, that goes without saying, but also the hill folk, down to the poorest

and meanest—and send the heads to Japan.”

– orders given by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 1598, to his troops invading Korea

Holds groaning with the burden of heads, soldiers hacked off noses instead

preserving them in brine, trophies enshrined in the homeland’s mounded earth,

the scent of light through high windows branching into warmth, to breathe you in,

should the world itself unmoor, this bed a silent raft, bearing us back to shore.

Holding Albert Einstein’s Hand

The corpse tree full of wasps.

Their razoring wings

outside my hospital window

in twos and threes, returning.

And so it goes, and so it goes –

a woman knows what a woman knows.

Words for losing places.

Hiraeth, saudade, morriña, dor.

The four chaise lounges of the apocalypse

wait for us on the sands, knowing

time is a rope, a deck of cards, an empty glass –

this place to sit by the ocean, watch

sanderlings run from the waves,

the long-fingered light of late afternoon.

Fear of disintegration

hollows out my bones.

I am becoming bird.

A sparrow flew into the house,

could not find its way out.

How it knocked, pinioned

fist, against the ceiling.

Years ago, my heart

was trapped like that,

and how the starlight

traveled toward me, though

I was already dead –

radiation to the marrow,

pharmakon swirling in my veins.

Everything dies.

Driving toward Venus,

I want to hear

what the sweet executioner says.

My bones like burning matchsticks.

Sometimes when I wake,

I’m shaping the world with my hands.

Sometimes when I sleep,

the world shapes me.

Once, I was energy

hiding inside the light,

or the shadow of light.

Love rooted us.

Together, exponential.

After, we spoke in tongues.

Our fingers cupped the universe like water.

____________________________________________

Bio:

Poet and journalist Ilyse Kusnetz is the author of Small Hours, winner of the 2014 T.S. Eliot prize from Truman State University Press, and The Gravity of Falling (2006). She earned her M.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University and her Ph.D. in Feminist and Postcolonial British Literature from the University of Edinburgh. Her poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, the Cincinnati Review, Crazyhorse, Stone Canoe, Rattle, and other journals and anthologies. She has published numerous reviews and essays about contemporary American and Scottish poetry, both in the United States and abroad. She teaches at Valencia College and lives in Orlando with her husband, the poet and memoirist Brian Turner.